Chapter 10
Rowan
“Ihate you,” Violet said to me.
Unkind. Untrue, but also unkind.
I leaned close to her and said, “So you’ve told me for years. Now, where is your shower?”
My words grated my own ears. I was exhausted, tapped out from the earlier encounter with that vampyre followed by the strain of searching for Violet with my heightened hearing all evening.
Every laugh, every whisper, every heartbeat had crashed into my skull like a jack hammer until I had nearly lost my mind tracking her.
Combined with my current hard-on that seemed to refuse to go down, I was surprised I hadn’t passed out.
I felt like a dirty grey rag, frayed and rung dry.
But exhaustion was not an excuse to be an asshole or a spoiled princess like the woman in front of me.
She turned and marched off. “Go. Away. You are not following me,” she said over her shoulder.
So, obviously, I followed her.
She stormed down the narrow hall as best as she could with painfully blistered feet. Each of her steps was deliberate and slow. The blisters bloomed red across her skin, and I saw the small streaks of crimson against her black cat sandals.
Blood. Fresh blood. She had no idea how thin that line was between daring and suicidal tonight. If she’d bled on that dance floor, not even I could’ve defended her from the speed of those monsters.
Part of me wanted to grab her, spin her around, and lecture until she let me handle this.
The quieter, darker part knew she wouldn’t listen, leaving me torn between harsh punishment and abandonment.
If she only knew how I teetered between humanity and self-preservation every goddamn second.
How my old instincts whispered to take what I wanted, consequences be damned.
Filled with nothing but her scent and heartbeat surrounding me as I filled her to the—
Fuck, I needed to leave.
I almost stalked the opposite direction as the hallway stretched too long, institutional lighting casting harsh shadows that made her look fragile despite her fury.
I could see a crack in her icy demeanor and yet I couldn’t seem to get her to agree with anything I was saying. She was a goddamn enigma.
Running water hummed from the communal shower at the far end, reminding me how exposed she’d be.
Not just physically. Every glance from the club’s shadows earlier had reminded me this world wasn’t safe.
Vampyres tracking her pulse with their eyes.
Werewolves noting her scent. Other supernaturals cataloging her as prey.
Fuck, she wasn’t even safe around me right now.
I closed the distance and called out to her. “Violet. Stop. Just. . . stop for a moment.”
“Walk and talk, Rowan. I’m going to be at the showers in a second, so you should talk fast.”
I reached out and held her elbow; a light touch, barely more than a brush of my fingertips against her skin, sending a jolt through my chest. I spoke with an urgency that forced my voice low as I said, “Violet, you have no idea what you are walking into.”
I thought about all the different ways I could explain to her the dangers of Oubliette, of the supernaturals that lurked there, of the supposed proprietor who ran the clubs.
I knew there was no way to tell her without sounding like a raving lunatic, that as much as I may have wanted to be honest with her. . . I could not.
A devilish smirk teased her lips, causing even more of my blood to go south. “I know exactly what I’m walking into. I’m walking into the showers,” she said as she pulled away and marched off.
This fucking brat.
I watched her disappear around the corner, her middle finger raised as she went.
The smart thing would have been to leave, to trust she would be fine until she was set to return to Oubliette in four days' time. But smart and right rarely traveled together in my world. My unease over the evening’s events anchored me to the spot like I’d grown roots through the floor.
I waited, palms pressed against the wall’s chill, head tilted back to keep myself from stalking into the showers with her.
The hallway stretched narrow, a tunnel of closed doors hiding whispered lives.
It was nearly midnight and hushed voices floated past in currents of gossip, broken phrases about professors and hookups and weekend plans.
Each time a door cracked open, I felt curious eyes on me before the darkness swallowed them once more.
Fuck, I didn’t know what the hell came over me when I followed her here.
I craved my rope, the meditation of knots against flesh.
The ritual. The certainty. My rented apartment had the mannequin I practiced on, a warm bed where I could pretend to sleep or spend the next few hours working through this restless electricity crackling under my skin since I watched her dance.
Since witnessing what lived beneath her careful mask.
Cause that’s fucking normal, wanting to go home and masturbate while thinking of your childhood friend. Treacherous ground, that.
My enhanced hearing picked up the rush of water through pipes, and the distant sound of her humming that same haunting melody she’d danced to.
The sound burrowed into my chest, twisted hard.
Pulled up the memory in painful clarity: light kissing her skin, her spine’s perfect curve, the calculated savagery in her limbs.
She’d moved like brutality wrapped in beauty, like she’d been born to capture attention and bend it until it broke.
I shut my eyes against the memory. Gods, if only she had fallen off the pole. So much heartache would have been saved for the both of us.
Gone was any sense of normalcy as invasive thoughts wondered how her skin would look when rope bit into her flesh.
I shifted my cock in my pants, wanting nothing more than to venture home, relieve myself, and sleep.
It felt wrong in many ways to crave her, yet I could not help the desperate hunger to bite into the forbidden fruit.
She was a brat. She was foul-tempered. Stubborn. I was not reacting to her. . . I was reacting to the house of monsters we had somehow managed to walk out of. That’s all it was. Residual adrenaline.
I slid down the wall until I was crouched, forearms on my knees and head leaned back. The corridor felt narrower with each passing minute, the weight of the building pressing in around me.
In the Wastelands, I’d spent years learning which battles to pick, which threats to neutralize, which dangers to respect from a distance.
Oubliette collected them all under one roof, invited them in, served them drinks, and called it entertainment.
The thought of Violet swimming through those waters, even with her sharp wits and claws, turned my insides to ice.
The way those scum lords watched her, the hunger in their eyes.
Violet was prey among predators and while I knew she’d commanded the room and could hold her own to some extent, I’d seen the brutality of those creatures.
I’d experienced it firsthand, and the idea of their dirty claws digging into her unmarred skin lit a fire in my chest. I needed to protect her and the only way I could do that was convincing her there was a better way.
But how do you convince a brat to listen? I could spank her firm ass into pretty shades of red and purple, I mused. I allowed myself a moment of that image—Violet bent over my knee, her bare ass in the air, the resounding sound of my palm clapping against her skin, her cheeks reddening.
No. She’s young. She’s my adopted father’s niece.
Charlie’s blood. The family I swore to protect.
I had already crossed a line by watching her strip after I promised she meant nothing to me.
Although those words were a pure contradiction to the raging boner threatening to burst my zipper. It felt so fucking wrong.
Then why does she feel perfect when I hold her in my arms?
I groaned and hugged my knees to my chest. I would not break the family’s trust. I promised Charlie I would watch her, yet I couldn’t get her out of my head.
Those full pink lips that spit fire and would look gorgeous wrapped around my length.
She brought out a side of me I hated when all I wanted to do was bury myself in her.
My muscles burned from holding still in my crouched position.
I tried to focus on the issue at hand. I had fought supernaturals before.
Back in my previous life, when my face matched my soul—old, ugly, scarred, and cruel.
But I had always fought on my own terms. Nothing like this, though.
Never a whole fucking nightclub of them.
Not in a place where they easily outnumbered me twenty to one.
Not with Violet’s pulse singing beside mine, a beacon to every predator with ears to hear.
I cursed the thinness of my luck.
Violet had stepped into a world I knew spelled death, and my gut knotted with an arctic fear I hadn’t felt since being chased through the Wastelands by The Library’s Hunter, a fear more visceral than any I’d felt in this new life.
This fear is not for you.
This fear came from more than failing my obligations. No, this fear held a wave of something raw and unspoken that crashed into soft places I had thought fossilized long, long ago.